“He was my brother,” he mumbled, slurring thick. “Half brother anyway. God damn it I let him down, I killed him, but God damn it God damn it I loved him!”
There was a stretch of silence at the end of which, with amazing abruptness, she slapped his face.
His head rocked back; he blinked and squinted at her. “What the hell was that for?”
“Shut up about killing him. You didn’t kiU him.”
“If I’d thrown him out of town the way I should have, he’d be alive.”
“No. He’d just have come back.”
“I thought you were the one who put him up to it.”
“If you want to blame me,” she said, “go ahead. I’ve been doing that myself. If anybody killed him it was me, not you. I wanted-”
He said with savage hastiness, “What did you want?”
She stood up, She had her back to him. “I wanted to make him into a man like you,” she said in a small voice.
He cackled.
It made her wheel. She lifted her hand as if to slap him again. He neither flinched nor guarded himself; he only stared at her brandished hand with a morose, vacuous scowl.
Slowly her hand dropped to her side. She shook her head. “Don’t you see, you couldn’t have stopped him. You couldn’t have kept it from happening. Maybe not the way it happened, but it would have happened sometime and someplace because I was too selfish and too stupid and too damned mixed up to know you can’t change anybody. I wanted to make him into something he wasn’t and I got him killed. And now,” she said with acid bitterness, “now I know. I’ had to learn from this that you can’t ever change anybody, you just have to accept them for what they are. Jesus, Jerr, Rafe was a goddamned good wrangler, he loved horses.”
She wasn’t crying but she refused to look at him; she turned her back again and he saw her small, tough hands bunched into fists, womanly fists, the thumbs inside the curled fingers.
She said, “Are you listening all right? Can you pay attention?”
“I guess so.”
“I have to say something and I don’t want to, and if I don’t say it to you now I probably won’t ever have the guts to again.”
He shook his head at her back. “I don’t know what you’ve got in mind but I think you’d better save it. Neither one of us is thinking too straight.”
Her fists tightened; he couldn’t see her face. He had to lean forward to hear her: “I’ve got to, Jerr, I’ve got to-I want you to listen to what I say and don’t interrupt. I put my hooks in Rafe because I wanted him to be you. I took him because I couldn’t get you, do you understand? He wasn’t you, he never would have been-let me finish! — but he was the closest thing there was to you. I tried to change him into you because you were the one I really wanted, and I knew as soon as we were married that I couldn’t do it but I wouldn’t give up, I couldn’t then, and you see what it did to him. It’s not your fault, what happened. It’s mine. Mine and Reese Cooley’s.”
He didn’t believe her. She wasn’t telling the truth; she meant the lie to show, she meant him to see through the falsehood, she just wanted to give him an out so he’d quit blaming himself. It had to be hke that; her story was too absurd. He said sourly, “Sure-sure. You say I was the one you wanted. You couldn’t get me. You flatter a man, Caroline. I never knew you even knew I existed until you and Rafe decided to get married.”
“I was always there but you never paid any attention to me. You weren’t interested in me-hell, why should you be? I was a young girl. My father’s not much older than you. You were out of my reach, Jerr, and I had to grab what I could get, and the closest thing to you was Rafe, and oh Jesus God I wish I could apologize to him.” She sank down on her knees with one arm across the iron foot of the bedstead.
He was developing a thudding headache that made it hard to think clearly. He had the taste of bile in his throat. He got up, swayed dizzily for a moment, said, “Be back,” and went down the corridor to the front desk. He asked the clerk for Seidlitz powders, got them and a filthy tumbler, and went back to the room to mix the compound. Caroline was sitting on the corner chair chewing her knuckle. He drank the bitter mixture and stood with his eyes closed until it went down into his belly and he felt it churning at work; he poured water into the commode basin and scrubbed his face.
When he toweled the water out of his eyes and looked at her, she was sitting up straight and there was fire in her eyes. She said, “All right, confession hour’s over, Jerr. We both made mistakes and Rafe suffered for them but we won’t be doing him or ourselves any good going on like this.”
“What do you suggest?” he said angrily. “A celebration?”
“No. But neither one of us is built to spend the rest of our lives wearing sackcloth and ashes over this.”
“You put him out of your mind just like that?” he said, incredulous. “He’s not even buried yet!”
“Women are tough,” she said. “My mother died when I was three. My father has outlived three wives. No, I haven’t put Rafe out of my mind. I probably never will. But we’ve got to-”
“Shut up,” he grated. “Shut up and get out. You make me sick.”
“How long do you intend to grieve? Are you going to brood over this the rest of your life?”
“That’s my business,” he snapped childishly.
She stood up. “All right, Jerr, you’ve had a rough time, that’s too bad. We’ve all had a rough time. But you’re standing on your own feet-you’re better off than you think you are. You’re not beaten-not unless you give up. Right now I think you’re trying to give up. Hell, be a man, Jerr.”
“Just who the hell do you think you’re talking to? Don’t crap all over me, Caroline, I don’t like being crapped on-I’m tired of it.”
“Sure. You’re burying yourself in self-pity. All right, have it your own way. But you’re sober enough now to listen to this. While you were out wherever you were, getting your guts pickled in rotgut whisky, that telegram you’ve been waiting for came.”
He stood bolt still and stared at her, the towel forgotten in his hands. He shook his head slowly in disbelief. “What telegram? What’d it say?”
“I don’t know what it said. It wasn’t delivered to me, or anybody else, because you couldn’t be found. But the Western Union boy spent three hours combing the town looking for you, and by the time he gave it up, everybody in town knew your message had arrived.”
Tree had tossed the towel aside and was headed for the door, reaching for his hat. Caroline said, “Never mind that. The office is closed, the telegrapher’s gone to bed and I have no idea where he lives. He said he’d have the message at the office for you when they open at eight in the morning. If Wyatt Earp can wait that long, you can too. And please don’t be forgetting, Rafe’s funeral is at nine.”
When he flung his hat away and stood with his back to her, grinding fist into palm, she said softly, “Jerr, you don’t even know what it says. Maybe it says the job’s off, the Governor refused to extradite them.”
And maybe it said to arrest the Earp brothers.
Ten
Only a handful stood on the hillside. A cold wind came down off the mountains, roughing up the aspen leaves, brushing the faces of Tree and Caroline, Sheriff McKesson, the circuit preacher, the undertaker and his two helpers, and three unshaven pilgrims drawn to the funeral by morbid curiosity. The preacher’s talk was flat, matter-of-fact, nothing beyond the words from the Book, for he had never met the deceased or even heard of Rafe Tree. When he finished his brief eulogy, Caroline sprinkled dirt on the simple pine casket and stood peering through her veil while the box was lowered by rope into the fresh grave.
The gravediggers stepped forward with their shovels. The preacher turned away, spoke softly to Caroline, shook Tree’s hand, nodded to the sheriff, and walked away down the hill toward town in the company of the undertaker.
Sheriff McKesson put his hat on-he seldom wore a hat but today he had, evidently, chosen deliberately to bring one so that he could make a point of removing it, his way of paying his respects to the deceased. Now, setting the hat firmly on his face so that the brim made a straight line across his brow, he walked ten paces downhill and stood waiting with calm patience.
